Honestly, the audio, for me, is better on the Biostar, because I find the input side(line-level) to be better, and I record a fair bit of audio on my PC. At the same time, many Realtek audio chips are paired with Creative software, and with good circuit design, either can be great, or with a bad circuit, horrible!

I find the Creative hardware a bit better overall for 3D positioning, and it seems to be more "game-friendly". The high-end is very crisp on the G1.Sniper M3, so when online gaming and chatting with people on TeamSpeak, for example, everything comes through very clearly with my own audio gear setup.

The G1.Sniper is very much a gamer-oriented product, and mainly for single-GPU users. This board, 3770K, set of G.Skill Sniper ram, GTX670, and a PCIe SSD would make for a killer mATX lan box!

not that impressed with the board lately, as you said Cadaveca the vcore required for OCing is a big turn off and my board just randomly has it's BIOS corrupt itself at random times even with the update. It's also happened to a build I was doing for a customer with the same board so I know it's not just me lol.

You were saying Dave, you needed more voltage to get your 4.6GHz clock compared to other mobo's.

Any chance the cpu has begun it's degradation?

Click to expand...

Nope, checked other already-tested boards, 1.2 V or less with them AFTER testing this board. Perhaps VRM refresh rate is at fault...which can be remedied with VRM tweaks in the 3D Power section, if you're so inclined.

Nope, checked other already-tested boards, 1.2 V or less with them AFTER testing this board. Perhaps VRM refresh rate is at fault...which can be remedied with VRM tweaks in the 3D Power section, if you're so inclined.

Click to expand...

Thanks Dave! By the way, what 3D settings are you talking about? Power Management?

Yeah it has been pretty obvious the Recon 3D and it's onboard solution is a pretty dumbed down chip compared to the previous X-Fi chips. They have clearly taken the easy way out and just simplified down to the point of it not being much better than an onboard solution.

I did not adjust it, and left it on auto. In fact, other than vDIMM, vIMC, and vCPU, I do not change anything in BIOS, other than enabling XMP and adjsuting multis. This is in part becuase of how I measure VRM power consumption, and secondly because I want to show just how really easy it is to clock IVB. vDIMM and vIMC should be taken care of by XMP settings, but many many boards do not adjust vIMC even if XMP profile dictates such a change, so I manually set them anyway, and the vCPU change is pretty obvious, of course. It also gives me a good idea of just how mature the BIOS is, to measure other changes and see how the boards react differently on auto settings. The more the OEM does for the end user automatically, the better, IMHO. We pay big bucks for PCs, so ease of use is a priority for that expense for many.

Yeah it has been pretty obvious the Recon 3D and it's onboard solution is a pretty dumbed down chip compared to the previous X-Fi chips. They have clearly taken the easy way out and just simplified down to the point of it not being much better than an onboard solution.

Click to expand...

I don't fully agree with Daniel_K's stance. He is a bit biased against Creative anyway, simply becuase he makes alternative drivers for audio products. He does to a lot for the enthusiast community, and he does touch on very valid "pros", but many of his listed "cons" are just nit-picking in my opinion, since he doesn't have the actual hardware at the time that post was made...he might now.

I use what many would consider high-end audio daily, and I must say, I really prefer the Recon3D chips that as all I've tested so far have been butloads ahead of X-Fi solutions to my ears. Daniel_K's posts admits that 3D positioning is better with these new chips, and what truly matters to most users is the actual quality of the audio, which can be greatly influenced with circuit design. Many other add-in solutions offer the option to swap out OpAmps for just this same reason.

Dont get me wrong though, overall I generally agree with that there post of his, but I think he's a bit too focused on shortcomings for overall audio design, when it might be better to have a simplified, more gamer-oriented DSP, which he does say it kind of is, anyway. And he does say that his opinion was based on looknig at the software, too, anyway.

The big thing to me is that is does offer very decent audio for gaming and music playback, while 3D positioning is better than it has ever been, but yes, the recording side of the chip is a bit lacking. One of the X-Fi's strengths was MIDI/ASIO latency, but since more users that will end up with the Recon3D products won't really use those functions anyway, it's not that big of a deal that they are gone.

Thanks for your opinion on the Recon. I will run my Fatality as long as I can. I bought it on release and it has served me well and is a great card. The fact that the PCI slot is disappearing would be the only reason I would have to give it up

I think board manufacturers are milking the cow strong lately. Mainstream products are going to be new low end and top boards are as expensive as some cheap used cars. It is almost ridiculous if it wasn't bad for us... So I have to give 200+ euro just to buy some board that can overclock good... And I remember the time of my socket A EpoX 8RDA3+ and AM2 EpoX MF4J Ultra... well nowadays this is nearly impossible. And they say there is competition... yeah right.

The review includes results from a P8P67 Pro, which was done using a 2600K. This review is done with a 3770K, which makes it incomparable on a board perspective. ie. the user is lead to believe the Z77 outperforms the P67 by a lot, when the actual difference is in the cpus.

May I suggest you either take out the P8P67 (and other boards that were tested with slower cpu) or retest boards with 3770K (yeah it's a lot of work..).

Alternatively you could link to a 2600K vs 3770K test and point out the performance difference percentage in the review.

On another note. A special on P67 vs Z77, both with 3770K would be really cool. See how much chipset actually affects performance.

The review includes results from a P8P67 Pro, which was done using a 2600K. This review is done with a 3770K, which makes it incomparable on a board perspective. ie. the user is lead to believe the Z77 outperforms the P67 by a lot, when the actual difference is in the cpus.

May I suggest you either take out the P8P67 (and other boards that were tested with slower cpu) or retest boards with 3770K (yeah it's a lot of work..).

Alternatively you could link to a 2600K vs 3770K test and point out the performance difference percentage in the review.

On another note. A special on P67 vs Z77, both with 3770K would be really cool. See how much chipset actually affects performance.

Click to expand...

Valid concerns, for sure. I will be doing a re-bench of quite a few products in the near future with a new VGA or three, and at this time I will be updating numbers on some older boards.

However, because in reality Z77 replaces P67/Z68, I won't be including numbers with p67-based products, as features are quite different. First of all, there's the PCIe functionality difference(2.0 vs 3.0), never mind the platform-specfic ones. To offset this, I'll probably only include Z68 results, with a PCIe 3.0-compliant board.

The P8P67 Pro reivew I posted nearly 14 months ago, and no longer have it in my possesion. I've donated nearly all my P67 gear(including 2600K). I'd have about 40 boards if I kept them all, and I just don't have space for that.

I do understand why you'd want that compare, however. Unfortunately, I do not do CPU reviews at this time.